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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
Criminal Records : Page 1, 2, 3 Perhaps the most recent invention in crime fiction has been the crime novel as entertainment, characterized by the novels of Robert Crais and Joe R. Lansdale, with their cynical humour, bizarre characters and convoluted plots. Crais’ "LA Requiem" was one of the best books of any genre last year and the latest in a long line of Elvis Cole novels that began with "The Monkey’s Raincoat". The character Elvis Cole is smart, funny and a sucker for a hard luck story, with a moral code that only he and his silent partner, Joe Pike, understand. Pike is Cole’s secret weapon; hardly speaking, always listening and harder than horseshoe nails, he is the human personification of the other half of Cole. Joe R. Lansdale has been described as the author of ‘the decade’s greatest crime series’, the Hap and Leonard stories. Beginning with "Mucho Mojo", they feature Hap Collins, redneck Texan philosopher, and Leonard Pine, black, gay and extremely aggressive, especially if you so much as look at his vanilla cookies. Usually there’s a woman involved, or a man in Leonard’s case, and more often than not the American Way is found to have taken a wrong turn with Hap and Leonard there to put it right again. Lansdale is a master of momentum; his pace is the kind of thing you’d expect more from Hunter S. Thompson than a crime writer and his eye for the grotesque causes him to populate his novels with people you’d pay money to view and then wish you hadn’t. While the trend in American crime fiction has been increasingly and unabashedly toward realism, in the UK the genre has largely remained focused on ‘classic’ detectives solving ‘classic’ crimes. Characters such as Peter Lovesey’s Victorian era police inspector Sergeant Cribb or PD James’ Police Commander Adam Dalgliesh enjoy widespread appeal with British audiences today, highlighting the extremely divergent tastes of audiences on the two continents. One can only speculate as to what the future holds for crime enthusiasts on either side of the Atlantic. The pessimist may say that the genre has played itself out but this dire warning has been sounded before in vain and given the genre’s seemingly limitless capacity to reinvent itself, it’s possible that the future may be bright indeed. When it comes to crime fiction, the greatest thing about what came before, apart from the pleasure that it still gives, is the pleasure of what comes after. Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com Jonathan Kearns writes for JustBooks.com. |
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